"Theme development is a tedious and difficult task, and for the GTK devs to be so careless in breaking their API at every turn disrespects the many hours people put into making themes for it. [...] I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned." I find the tone of this one a bit too harsh and overly negative at times, but his point still stands.

There does seem to be a pretty extreme rift in the OS world. There are those who "just want to be productive" and for them Windows, OS X and (to a certain degree) Ubuntu meet that need.

If you're not going to upgrade the system, I suppose this is true, but once you factor in upgrades and updates (and you are going to need to upgrade at *some* stage), I'm not sure it holds. Ubuntu updates often break things so that you then have to spend hours making simple stuff work again, and OS X now seems to want you to adapt to new ways of working with each new release. I went back to Slackware on my main work machine mainly because I was tired of change and wanted stability. Slackware 13.37 was the first version I'd used since 9, and I could essentially pick up where I'd left off.

Often you'll find them starting out with something like Slackware and KDE, then getting into Arch or Gentoo with a minimalist window manager, or in some extremes foregoing X altogether and doing everything in screen sessions and unplugging the mouse.

Bang on right, though for many this is a matter of productivity rather than control. I do this more and more when I'm working, for example, largely because I'm sick of desktop environments that want to reshape my work habits or worm their way into my personal identity. I just want them to get out of my way and fade into the background so I can get on with work. A simple window manager like Window Maker or Openbox in contrast for the most part does just this. And yeah, I do work in X-less sessions - I started doing this as a reaction to where modern desktop environments seemed to be going, but I've found that if all I need to do is do a test-run of a model, or write a paper in LaTeX, a purely text-based session is wonderfully distraction-free.